Day 3 – Almost to Austin!

Well once again I’ve lied to you all. Instead of taking the high road through Memphis and Little Rock, I decided to pay Mardi Gras a homage and see what Louisiana is like. Turns out its very flat (compared to the states surrounding it). It was cool going over the Mississippi River though.

Today was quite adventurous. It started with me having to re-fill the coolant in my radiator again, which means it must be leaking out more than I originally expected because I just filled it all the way up yesterday, and I had to add quite a bit again today. Maybe I can convince IBM that this long roadtrip paid a real toll on my car, and they should reimburse me for a new car as well :-). But I guess we should probably focus on getting some money for the basic stuff (gas, hotel, etc.) first.

As for the trip… Everything went pretty smoothly. It turns out that there’s really only one road from Alabama to Dallas (Route 20W), so now that I look back and think about it, there are probably only 6 or 7 different roads between Upstate NY and Austin, TX. Which is pretty crazy. We should all thanks Theodore Roosevelt for this awesome interstate roadway system we’ve got setup here lol (Ludlow will probably correct me on this fact… wait for it).

Looking at this map, doesn’t really give today’s drive any justice. It definitely felt longer than this. But 14 hours, and 900 miles later, I don’t really care because I made it to my final destination, and hopefully I never have to make that drive again (Maybe I’ll open a savings account in case I ever need to move back to NY).

Another cool thing about my trip is that it was over 2000 miles, so I got to see my car go from exactly 163,000 miles when I left NY, to just over 165,000 miles when I arrived in Austin. The green hornet’s getting old…

So that’s about all I’ve got for tonight… I really need to get some sleep.

Tomorrow I’ll be exploring the city and checking things out a little bit. Saturday I’m going out with my new friend Jessie (my friend Andrew’s girlfriend, and part-time apartment locator) to check out some potential places to live. Hopefully we can find something good pretty quick. Hotels are much more exciting and fun when you’re a little kid lol…